IT Projects: Why They Fail & Remedial Recommendations

We know why projects fail, we know how to prevent their failure; so why do they still fail?

Projects related to the implementation of information technologies and systems that haven't delivered the expected return on investment has been the topic of many articles, conferences, symposiums, studies, and research initiatives. 

And, if you work in the IT industry, you face this reality, practically, daily.

Based on my experience of working with teams on many a project I've highlighted below a handful of common reasons of why projects fails (this is by no means an exhaustive list) and suggested fixes.

Inept planning

While it’s always easy to recognize failure at the end of a project, it almost always starts at its inception. Projects are often under-scoped, sold by sales teams without due diligence conducted by delivery teams, poorly planned, under staffed, do not get the right level of prioritization etc. Even the best laid plans can be derailed by urgent or unplanned stuff that crops up all the time. In fact, the average IT organization spends nearly half of its time on fire drill activities!

Suggested fix: Map out the entire lifecycle of each project before you get started. Ensure that work priorities align with the company’s overall strategic objectives and that key stakeholders are on board. Build status updates and reporting, a well defined approval processes, a communication framework and governance into the work plan, so there’s no confusion with respect to responsibilities, dependencies and the involvement of the right people at the right time. Since fire drills are inevitable, build into the plan/estimates a “contingency” budget to accommodate urgent requests without jeopardizing the projects timeline.

 Lack of visibility

Poor visibility leaves the entire team flying blind. Status reports are often out of date because no one remembers to make updates, or, they don’t want to admit that they’re running behind. In many organizations, responsibility for maintaining and updating project status in spreadsheets or project management software falls on the shoulders of just one or two people (often project managers), who spend most of their time chasing down team members for information.

Suggested fix: Develop a centralized system for documenting all tasks that are part of the project. Decentralizing the status and reporting functions and making it a natural part of the workflow, spreads the responsibility across the entire team and ensures the current status is always current. And, it will eliminate the need for multiple weekly status meetings with different stakeholders that are a glorious waste of time at best!

A plethora of disconnected tools

Technology is an enabler to success, but when it becomes overwhelming, it can be more of a hindrance than advantage. The average person uses a dozen or so different methods to control and manage their time. When productivity tools get out of control, critical data gets lost in the shuffle. Team members spend too much time and energy searching for information in emails, the intranet, shared folders, keeping tools updated etc. and end up working just as hard to stay in the loop as they are on project related deliverables and milestones.

Suggested fix: Choose a comprehensive tool and stick with it. Deploy a standardized platform in which all project communication, collaboration and data storage and sharing takes place, within the context of the work, and in full visibility of the entire team. For example; a cloud-based centralized platform can consolidate communication threads, make data accessible and easy to find, and provide a frustration-free system for interaction among team members, irrespective of where they are located.

Poor resource allocation

This goes hand in glove with the lack of visibility. Project team members do not have a complete view on who’s working on what, who might have some excess capacity and what the upcoming tasks looks like; teams quickly become overwhelmed and the work just keeps piling on. Bottlenecks in the workflow bring the entire project to a screeching halt, but it’s unclear where or exactly why they occur. Finger pointing, overtime, shortcuts and “good enough” become standard operating procedure, as do errors, rework and revisions to fix the problems that result.

Suggested fix: By gaining visibility over the workflow, work capacity and current assignment queue for team members with a centralized work management system, it’s easy to see where resource deficits and bottlenecks lie. But, beyond just shedding light on the problem, empower team members to ask for help and/or decline assignments (with justification) as appropriate. Once one has got a handle on visibility and resource allocation, help teams to minimize interruptions, giving them more time to focus on productive work. Allocate “blackout” hours during which internal meetings/calls are prohibited.

Lack of measurement and consistent lessons learned

Project failure is often a cycle of repeating common mistakes repeatedly. Project debriefs are designed to identify “lessons learned” and help to improve the process for future application. But in many cases, these do little more than pay lip service to what went wrong, and end up becoming more of a “blame game” than a useful and insightful exercise to drive continuous improvement.

Suggested fix: Establish goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for every stage of the process not just the project as a whole and track progress against those goals along the way. By examining performance and problems at each phase, in smaller pieces, rather than in aggregate across the entire project, it’s easier to make incremental adjustments to improve the overall end result. In this way, process improvements won’t seem like such an upheaval when you implement them on the next project, which lowers the learning curve and keeps the process changes themselves from getting in the way of progress.

Sometimes project failures happen for reasons beyond one’s control, and there’s certainly no magic bullet that can put a stop to failure in every possible scenario. But, when the same issues continue to manifest in the same failures; missed deadlines, over budget, over-worked team members and poor results, repeatedly; it’s time to take action by putting these simple steps in place

Good project management is a process of continuous improvement. It is a cycle of making mistakes and learning from them. It is a process of continuous learning.